Arduino Brings Business Card Cutter Back From the Dead

Office equipment, such as printers and the like, are probably under-appreciated. They thanklessly churn through stacks of paper unnoticed until something goes wrong, at which point they're maligned, and potentially even discarded.

In this case, the equipment in question was a CC-330 card cutter that was damaged two years ago, perhaps owing to a bad power supply. A repair with parts from the manufacturer was prohibitively expensive, and since a newer more capable unit had already been purchased, the CC-330 was simply left inactive, likely in a closet somewhere.

With a bit of downtime due to COVID-19, however, Imgurian tommycoolman got to work retrofitting it with Arduino controls. These includes an Arduino Mega clone, four steper motor drivers, and various sensors to work out the state of the paper and knife position. There’s also, of course, a new power supply, which at 24V and 20A, will hopefully be more than enough for the system. Three original steppers in the machine were reused, while the knife motor was replaced with a larger model.

The user interface was replaced with an array of buttons as well, with a nice vinyl printed cover on top. A small OLED screen gives user feedback, which although smaller than the original 20x2 LCD, shows more characters than the previous iteration. The total cost of the retrofit was around $200, and yet slower than when it was new, it now works more consistently, with more accurate cuts.